


An Autumn Sound

by flowercrownremus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Series, mentions of depression and ptsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 15:29:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2737772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowercrownremus/pseuds/flowercrownremus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Still struggling to adjust to post-war life, Harry returns to Hogwarts for the first time since the death of Voldemort to visit an old friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Autumn Sound

All the leaves on the trees glow like coins in the high afternoon sun — copper, bronze, gold, the riches of Hogwarts offering themselves to Harry once again. He inhales the taste of the cold lake, the clear air. So unlike London, where he’s got himself a little flat not far from Ron and Hermione. So unlike all the cities he’s visited these past many months, traversing the world in an attempt to run (he can’t pretend otherwise) from the still-constant press coverage, and the breakup with Ginny, and the Auror program whose offer he couldn’t talk himself into accepting. He had never really traveled before — the months he’d spent on the run, hunting aimlessly for Horcruxes, hardly counted. “It’ll do you good,” Hermione had said, and it had, the distance, the distractions, but weeks became months became almost a year, and Harry, celebrating his twentieth birthday alone in Taipei, at last decided to come home.

In his pocket, Harry fingers the letter Neville sent him last week. _Ginny tells me that you’re back in the country,_ it begins. _I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m working at Hogwarts now._

He hasn’t seen Hogwarts since that day two years ago, a day that dawned with Voldemort’s death. What a bleak place it had been then, his home become a battlefield and a graveyard, but he’d forgotten how old Hogwarts is, and it wears its scars with self-assurance. History settles around the school, but still it stands. In the light of the yellow autumn sun, Hogwarts gives the same impression it did when Harry was eleven — it is ancient, beautiful, and, somehow, unbelievably, his.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” a voice calls from the direction of the greenhouses. “The time ran away from me.” Neville, slightly flushed, hurries to meet Harry, wiping his muddy hands on his robes. “Merlin, Harry,” he says in lieu of a hello, “you just keep getting taller. How are you?”

“You’re one to talk,” Harry replies.

Neville is still fair-haired and chubby, his freckles brown against the pink of his round cheeks, but he’s nearly as tall as Harry now, and grown broad-shouldered, strong, his hands large and powerful. He is an adult, a professor now, with the smile of the boy Harry used to know.

He waves a hand and asks again, “How are you? You’ve already been to see Hagrid?”

“We had lunch at the Three Broomsticks.” 

Hagrid had been Hagrid, effusive, all too kind. He wanted to hear about everywhere Harry had been and everything he’d seen, every detail that Harry had already put down in letters and every detail he hadn’t, all the Muggle wonders he’d experienced and all the magical folks he’d met along the way, and then Hagrid told Harry about everyone he’d seen the past year, each visit he’d had from Ron and Hermione, and one from Luna too. “Just the same, that one,” he’d laughed. He’d even seen Draco Malfoy once, though only in passing outside the Headmistress’s office — it seems he has a job with the Ministry now. On their way to Hogwarts, when Hagrid asked about Harry’s plans now that he was back, and Harry had only shrugged, Hagrid gripped his shoulder and said, “That’s jus’ fine, Harry. Take all the time you need. If anyone’s earned that, ’s you.”

Neville pushes his sleeves up, his grin easy. “Don’t know what I’d do without Hagrid. He’s the only friend I’ve got. Don’t laugh, Harry, but I still can’t bring myself to call any of the professors by their given names. McGonagall told me to call her Minerva, but I think if I actually did it she’d hex me. And I think I’d deserve it.”

“Minerva.” Harry laughs. “It would be weird.”

“Very weird.”

“But you’ll get used to it, I think. Hagrid says you’ve been great. Says all your students love you.”

Neville blushes again and turns away, gazing across the grounds. The students must all be in classes or still at lunch — Harry’s not certain exactly what time it is — because there’s no one around but the two of them. The wind that carries air toward them from across the lake is chilly, and Harry glances again at Neville’s bare forearms, muscular and tan, and shoves his own hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket.

“The students are really wonderful,” Neville says after a moment. He rubs a hand across his forehead, unconcerned about the smudge of dirt he leaves behind. “But that’s strange too. Some of them were there, you know, that night. And even the ones that weren’t have all heard about it.” His mouth thins into something like a smile. “They do ask a load of questions about that damned snake.” His eyes, brown like autumn leaves are brown, with the flicker of gold in them, meet Harry’s. “They ask questions about you too.”

“Of course they do.”

Neville’s hand clasps the Harry just above the elbow, along the line of his bicep, and Harry’s heart contracts as if jolted with electricity. He thinks, absurdly, that he may cry. 

“I only mean, I was thinking of you. It’s impossible to be here and not think of you, ‘course, but then these children ask me if you’re all right and I want to be able to say, Harry’s great, Harry’s finally living his life without this great awful shadow over it, but I don’t know if that’s true at all.” He lets go of Harry. “Sorry. It’s not my business, and I know you need your privacy after everything.”

“It’s fine,” Harry manages through the tightness in his chest.

Neville shakes his head. “It’s not my business. But I hope you know — ” He rubs his forehead again, pushing a blonde lock out of his face. “I’m saying this so stupidly, but — I care. Nobody will ever know what it’s like to be you, not even Ron and Hermione. I’m sure they get as close as anyone can. But I — ”

The wind cuts through them again, and Harry realizes that Neville doesn’t know how close he came to being Harry. He never told him about the Prophecy or what it meant. It would’ve been a burden, and though Neville is Harry’s friend, and his ally, and a leader of the battle just as much as Harry had been, even more so, really, Harry has never known how to widen the circle of his secrets beyond Ron and Hermione. It’s part of why he and Ginny broke up, in the those hard months when they learned that winning a war felt nothing at all like winning a Quidditch match.

He owes Ginny more than he could give her, but maybe he can at least tell Neville the truth. Maybe he can share the weight, if Neville is willing to shoulder it.

“It’s all right, Neville, honestly. It’s really, er, nice of you.” That’s not quite what he means, though, so he pushes up his glasses and tries again: “It’s good to have someone my side. Good to have you on my side. It means something, it does.”

Neville squints up at the sky, looking embarrassed, and shoves his hands into the pockets of his robes. “Ah,” he mutters to himself after a moment. “I think I’ve lost my quill.” He turns his head toward Harry, his face still a little flushed, and, sighing, asks, “Well. Do you want to see the Memorial?”

  


* * *

  


It was a great scandal two years ago when the Memorial for the Fallen was unveiled and Harry Potter was not present. He ought to have been there, of course, to honor them all. He thought about them every night, worrying over their names like little prayers: Fred, Lupin, Colin, Lavender, Tonks, Snape, even Crabbe. Some nights he would go from the very beginning, think through all the death he’d ever known, his mum and his dad, Cedric Diggory, Sirius through the veil, Dumbledore in the tower, Dobby on the clammy sand. Himself, briefly, in the Forbidden Forest, the flash of green light in his eyes.

The Memorial was planted on the edge of the Forest, where the Whomping Willow once stood. Harry knows this. He’s seen the proposals, Luna’s sketches, the Ministry’s edits, all of them run past him “as a courtesy” though Harry had nothing to say about the plan, except that it was lovely and inadequate and he wasn’t ready to fold everything neatly away into the past. In the end he didn’t even go to the unveiling, instead staying home at the last minute because the thought of the press and the questions and the sight of Hogwarts so soon after it had all happened made him shake with anger and then exhaustion. Ginny offered to stay behind with him, he remembers, but he told her he wanted to be alone.

The _Prophet_ didn’t go so far to accuse him of callousness, but his absence was nevertheless a topic of speculation for days. _Where is the Boy Who Lived?_ headlines asked, and Harry feared they would realize that he was holed up in Grimmauld Place, avoiding his girlfriend, uncertain how to talk about anything that had happened with anyone other than Ron and Hermione. He was supposed to be living the life he’d fought so hard to keep, but he was barely eighteen and he was just so tired.

When Harry asks about it, Neville says, “The unveiling was nice. Something more private might’ve been better, I guess, but I wouldn’t know how to draw the line. Not that anyone was asking me to. But almost everyone lost someone in the war. The whole wizarding world was mourning.” He nudges Harry with his elbow. “I don’t blame you for not being there, Harry. No one does.”

“Thanks.” 

He stares at the Memorial, reading the names of the dead, carved with precision into the trunk of the magnificent white tree. He wants to thank them, still. He wants to tell them he loves them. He wants to honor their sacrifices, live out their lives alongside his own, but he doesn’t know how to be anything more than Harry — not the Boy Who Lived or the master of the Elder Wand or the hero of a war he never wanted, but Harry Potter, the child who only ever wished for a home.

The wind shakes the silver leaves on the tree, but none of them fall. Luna told him once that they never would. “This tree,” Harry says, “do you know about it?”

Neville, blinking slowly, nods. “Ye- _es_ ,” he says after a moment. “Didn’t you know? I helped Professor Sprout transport it. It’s very delicate when it’s out of soil, but once it gets its roots in, it’s the strongest tree in the world, practically immortal. It’s called a unicorn oak.” He puts his hand to the unmarked side of the trunk. “Their names will last on here for thousands of years.”

He looks at Harry and, after a moment’s hesitation, says, “Harry, you don’t have to be a monument yourself. They won’t be forgotten, I promise. This tree will live a lot longer than you or me or anyone.” He clears his throat and, with a kind of lunging, unexpected gesture, grasps Harry’s hand in his own. His fingers are warm and calloused and strangely comfortable. “I know what it’s like when you feel like — like you have the shape of someone you love inside of you, and you feel you owe your life to them, but, you see, if they loved you, then they loved you for you. Not for whatever path you might follow. Just for who you are. And you are enough as you are, Harry.” He makes a little grimace. “Do you — do you know what I mean?”

The color is high on Neville’s cheeks and Harry doesn’t know if it’s the crisp autumn air, or the way the light falls through the pale foliage onto his face, or if it’s the fact of their still entangled hands, but he doesn’t let go, not yet, not so soon. Above them, the leaves rustle with the sound of a thousand tiny bells singing out, silver and bright.

  


* * *

  


  
art by [aud-works](http://aud-works.tumblr.com/post/109460833186/an-autumn-sound-hp-fic-by-werewolfmcwerewolf-a)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "The Autumn" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
> 
> Go, sit upon the lofty hill,  
> And turn your eyes around,  
> Where waving woods and waters wild  
> Do hymn an autumn sound.  
> The summer sun is faint on them —  
> The summer flowers depart —  
> Sit still — as all transform’d to stone,  
> Except your musing heart.
> 
> How there you sat in summer-time,  
> May yet be in your mind;  
> And how you heard the green woods sing  
> Beneath the freshening wind.  
> Though the same wind now blows around,  
> You would its blast recall;  
> For every breath that stirs the trees,  
> Doth cause a leaf to fall.
> 
> Oh! like that wind, is all the mirth  
> That flesh and dust impart:  
> We cannot bear its visitings,  
> When change is on the heart.  
> Gay words and jests may make us smile,  
> When Sorrow is asleep;  
> But other things must make us smile,  
> When Sorrow bids us weep!
> 
> The dearest hands that clasp our hands, —  
> Their presence may be o’er;  
> The dearest voice that meets our ear,  
> That tone may come no more!  
> Youth fades; and then, the joys of youth,  
> Which once refresh’d our mind,  
> Shall come — as, on those sighing woods,  
> The chilling autumn wind.
> 
> Hear not the wind — view not the woods;  
> Look out o’er vale and hill —  
> In spring, the sky encircled them —  
> The sky is round them still.  
> Come autumn’s scathe — come winter’s cold —  
> Come change — and human fate!  
> Whatever prospect Heaven doth bound,  
> Can ne’er be desolate.
> 
> ****
> 
> Consider following [aud-works](http://aud-works.tumblr.com) on tumblr -- she's a fantastic artist! I'm obsessed with all of her art, and I'm in love with the illustration she did for this fic.


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